Book Review: Miranda Devine’s “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide”

The terrifying reality is they succeeded. The more terrifying thought is what will they do next to keep power?

Roughly one year ago, I wrote a book review of Mollie Hemingway’s “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Hemingway’s book brilliantly exposed how the Left rigged nearly every aspect of Donald Trump’s candidacy, presidential transition, presidency, and reelection to ensure he’d stand little chance of winning on Election Day in 2020. About a month after “Rigged” came out, Miranda Devine released “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.” Devine’s incredibly detailed account of the contents of Hunter’s laptop serves as a corollary companion book highlighting the Left’s effort to protect Joe Biden to regain the reins of power.

With the release on Friday night of internal Twitter documents by Elon Musk covering the censorship of the New York Post’s October 2020 coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, I decided it was time to read Devine’s book, which I recently had purchased (sorry it took me a year, Miranda;-) I literally couldn’t put it down, reading it cover-to-cover in a few hours. Musk’s document release confirmed what we already knew as detailed by Devine. Namely, the Biden campaign, Democrats, and the Deep State worked tirelessly to stop Americans from learning—not about Hunter’s despicable life of drugs, prostitutes, and familial drama as vividly detailed on the laptop (seriously, who has an affair on their wife and starts sleeping with their dead brother’s wife then her sister within weeks and months of burying him? 🤮 )—but about Joe’s covert role in his son’s and brother’s business of selling access to or perceived access to Joe as Vice President to foreign entities for millions.

As Joe, Jim, and Hunter believed, the Biden name would open doors for clients around the world. Joe called it the “Delaware Way.” Importantly, Devine shows how Joe used his power as a U.S. Senator to get Hunter jobs with companies and at pay levels Hunter didn’t deserve (i.e., Burisma wasn’t the first time someone paid Hunter for nothing). The Biden family also managed to acquire and sell real estate at hefty profits. Devine details these facts as she carefully builds the case against Joe leading to the wholesale selling of access once Joe became Vice President, with Hunter always serving as the point-of-contact to keep Beau “clean” en route to him becoming a U.S. Senator.

No reasonable person reading chapters nine through fourteen can conclude anything other than that there is significant direct and circumstantial evidence of Joe’s knowledge of and involvement in the Biden family swindle. I intentionally use the word “swindle” because there is really no evidence that Hunter or Jim provided their various clients with any value other than being related to the sitting Vice President. Former partner Tony Bobulinski figured out the swindle, but law enforcement did nothing with his claims, backed by documents, that Joe was involved in the swindle. There certainly is more hard proof of Biden’s illegal conduct than there ever was for Trump’s collusion with Russia, yet Biden remains free of a special counsel despite the clear conflict at the U.S Department of Justice in investigating the case. Sorry, Bill Barr, you should have had the guts to appoint one and that failure looks worse every day.

Devine does a meticulous job of tying various trips abroad or events in Washington, D.C., to facts gleaned via other sources to show Joe miraculously always showing up at dinners, hosting breakfasts, or highlighting Hunter’s presence to his clients or potential “investors.” Devine reveals details I’d never heard before. There is little doubt had Devine’s book been identical except for swapping out the Biden family for the Trump family, she and the team at the New York Post would have earned a Pulitzer for their work and been compared to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Alas, in our two standards society, Democrats get a pass for doing what would end a Republican’s career (see Kennedy, John; Kennedy, Ted; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; and Biden, Joe).

Personally, the most interesting part of the book was Devine’s recounting of the Burisma scandal. I always thought I understood the issue, but couldn’t figure what I was missing given what appeared to be a clear case of Joe using his government power as Vice President to help Hunter’s client, Burisma, escape an investigation. Joe even bragged about his power in getting the prosecutor fired in exchange for $1 billion in U.S. funds. Devine does a phenomenal job laying out the facts and timeline, including material I’d never heard about before, in a manner that ended my confusion. I did understand the issue. The Left and its sycophants simply have tried to obscure what happened. The fact that within a few months of Joe leaving office Burisma halved Hunter’s monthly pay should have been all anyone needed to “see” the swindle.

The one element of Hunter’s life exposed by Devine that frankly should receive more attention is that allegedly best-dad-in-the-world Joe decided to run for president as his son’s whereabouts were unknown during yet another drug-fueled binge. Having lost daughter Naomi in a tragic car accident and son Beau to cancer, it is shocking Joe’s narcissistic fourth pursuit of the presidency clearly was more important to him than his son’s condition, especially given the real risk that Hunter, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, could easily have overdosed and died. Joe’s run just seems gross now knowing just how badly Hunter was doing. In fairness, however, I find it unseemly how many politicians in their late seventies and eighties cling on to power in D.C. rather than enjoy life back home with their spouses, kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids.

The last vital detail fleshed out by Devine is the extant of the Biden family’s relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. She weaves together facts going back decades to show that Joe and Hunter had deep ties to Xi and his power base. Is it really that much of a leap to connect the intentional act by Xi’s Chinese government to allow international travel to the West from Wuhan as he stopped domestic travel from Hubei Province knowing it would cause death, economic destruction, and, most importantly, imperil Trump’s reelection? Once Joe secured the Democrat nomination, China knew it would face a far more conciliatory America with Joe in The White House than the tough-on-China Trump. Plus, with the Biden family still invested in a multi-billion-dollar fund tied to Xi, leverage simply wouldn’t be an issue. Based on the latest reporting, the Biden’s still own their shares in the fund. Perhaps that explains Joe’s tepid response to the protests in China last week.

At the end of the day, I get why Trump so desperately wants another shot at the presidency. He really does have a legitimate grievance that his first term was unfairly mired down by the Russia hoax and that the 2020 election was rigged as Hemingway and Devine detail in their books. Of course, Trump did himself harm with his response to COVID and his churlishness at times, but there is little doubt that he still would have won reelection in 2020 had voters not been dupped by the Left, the media, and the Deep State about Russian collusion and had voters heard about the Biden swindle.

Both books would make great Christmas gifts for people you know who can be reasoned with about what has happened over the last six years. Every American from high school and up should read Devine’s book along with Hemingway’s book to fully understand what happened over the last six years, how it has warped American society for the worse, and why the Bidens are not only no better than the Trumps, but they are actually worse. The Trumps got rich by churning real estate deals and their own fame. The Bidens got rich by selling out Main Street America, in some cases to our enemies.

It is important you widen your aperture to understand that the Left and its various appendages, including the paramount work of the Deep State, worked zealously to both attack Trump at every turn as it simultaneously did what it could to protect Joe Biden. “Rigged” and “Laptop from Hell” are the one-two punch exposing that conspiracy to deceive Americans and seize power. The terrifying reality is they succeeded. The more terrifying thought is what will they do next to keep power?